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>Canadian ISPs have had caps and over usage charges for years.

Some have had them. A few of the big ones had them but were either sued or embarrassed into admitting them. Most of the smaller ISP have none, and don't suffer for it. That's because smaller ISPs buy their incoming bandwidth by the connection, not by the byte. If you don't believe me, ask cogent the price of a 1 gbit unlimited (as in 100% saturation all the time) link. They'll give you a price. It'll be high, but as long as you have enough users to make it worth it, there you go. True unlimited that doesn't cost you extra to implement.

Thank God I'm on one of the good ISPs that does this (teksavvy). If only more would do that. In fact, teksavvy expects its unlimited users to use 200 GB+ a month, considering their "premium" service (routed also over links where teksavvy pays by the byte) *is* capped to this. And you don't pay much more, about $10 a month.

If cable has any real problems, it's either that they buy incoming connections the wrong way (by the byte, rather than the way they sell them, as unlimited) or that they are finding nodes that are saturated. Nodes that are saturated either should be upgraded, or, well, it's the cable co's fault for overselling it. Nobody elses. It's not costing the cable co money to saturate a node, though. It's just costing them customers. There's a huge difference. Hopefully they will notice it.

I am not a Rogers internet customer anymore - but my parents are. They cannot subscribe to DSL in their area, and I hear all the complaints that they have with Rogers service.

Personally, I'm a TekSavvy customer and could not be happier (other than even more speed or an ever cheaper price).

You're right, they do deserve a mention. When I tell people about how great Teksavvy's service is, they ask how much extra it will cost. When I tell them that its cheaper, they ask why I didn't tell them sooner. Everything else aside, the customer service is what does it for me. I really appreciate having someone there to answer the phone. I appreciated even more the help that they gave to my girlfriend when she needed to reconfigure our DSL modem after its settings were reset and I was out of town. She couldn't get in touch with me, so she called teksavvy, and they walked her through the process even though we have an unsupported modem that was bought refurbished from somewhere else.

Hey, why not mention them by name? I think it's worth supporting "the little guys" not only with my $$$ but by /vertisement!

Seriously, though, as geeks it behooves us all to support techcos that offer good service at good prices, deliver value, actually have a person answer the phone on the first or second ring, and aren't knobs.

I went to teksavvy in the first place for the price, the low cost fixed IP, and the "it's your connection, do with it as you will" philosophy (servers are OK, no traffic shaping - at least none that negatively impacts my downloads or uploads, regardless of protocol), and having been there a while, I'd be willing to pay a monthly "not a bunch of knobs like the artful dodger major cable provider and nationwide unsympathetic DSL provider, both of whom shall remain nameless" premium.

Verizon DSL for $34.95/mo for 3.0/768

In parts of Ontario, Alberta, BC, and Quebec, we have this little independent, $29.95 for 5M/800K, $4 for a static IP.

Oh, and they're cool with servers.

Gotta love the little guys. Glad I dropped Rogers....

Rogers is one of the dirtiest businesses I have ever seen in my life, far exceeding even the worst excesses of Microsoft when they were truly untouchable.

I have no idea why they keep their internet customers... it's probably due to marketing. In Ontario both Bell and Rogers both bite the big one, and since they are the only two choices most people are aware of, there's no incentive to switch to an equally crappy service.

I too use TekSavvy and cannot be happier. Customer service is prompt, there are no touch-tone menus to surf through to get some help, and the prices are LESS THAN HALF of what Rogers charges for roughly equivalent service. (fyi it's 5Mbps, 200GB/month for $25 vs. 6Mbps, 75MB/month for $50.)

I really do wish that company did more marketing, if only so they can really stick it to Rogers. These guys are robbers in every way imaginable. They use their domination of Canada's GSM market to extort ridiculous charges from their users, and force unbelievably expensive cable bundles down your throat for daring to want to watch TV. It's ridiculous, and IMHO ought to be illegal.

I experienced these problems. Torrents becoming unusable (one week I could download an Ubuntu ISO at 550K, the next week it dropped to 0.6 and continued to drop from there, making my one hour download a 62 day download had I kept using bittorrent). I started to use an encrypted proxy, but within weeks, that ceased to work, and my work VPN went with it.

After that, I switched to a local ISP, and never looked back.

Goddamn, I hate Rogers. At least they're being honest with their bandwidth caps now. Unfortunately, I find myself in the position of having to switch fairly soon to a cable-based service as the phone lines in this apartment are horribly old and low-quality. My experience with TekSavvy has been great from a customer service standpoint but it seems any DSL line I get here will be subject to the same problems, problems my landlord is almost certainly not willing to fix.

I know about 3web but I've heard some fairly bad things as well. Can anyone recommend some non-DSL, high speed (5+ MBPS), preferably low-cost ISPs in the London, Ontario area?

On another note, I'm almost certain this is going to cause unforeseen problems for Rogers, or at least their customers. I'm glad I don't do tech support for them...

And as pointed out in TFA, this has some pretty evil possibilities. Barring the obvious censorship issues, who's to prevent Rogers from replacing, say, Google Adsense scripts with their own ads? They already do it with Bell ads on their digital cable. Don't believe me? If you have Rogers digital cable, you'll notice that there are some ads that play on every channel that has commercials. If you look closely at the start of these ads, you'll usually see about a half second of another ad, quickly replaced by the Rogers network-wide one. These preempted ads are usually for Bell ExpressVu, Rogers' main (satellite) competitor.

But, like most cable companies, they remain because they have a monopoly on the cable market. Ultimately, this is the problem that needs to be solved before the rest, and I don't see it happening any time soon.

Note: I do not work for these guys, nor do I get any benefit from pimping like this, I'm just a very satisfied customer.

I'm not sure which ISP the parent post was referring to - there are a few of them. Actually, there are MANY 3rd party DSL providers in Canada, it's just that few of them are worth a damn (much like the big-boy telcos). I'm with TekSavvy and they have been awesome for the last 8 months or so I've been with them. Fast speeds, cheap prices, 24h phone support that always gets answered by the 4th ring (holy cow!), and just all-around great service.

Not only is the phone line answered promptly, the techs really know what they're doing, and there are never any of the checklists that I faced with Rogers and Bell, assuming you're a clueless idiot. Also, the one instance when they WERE flooded with calls, I was presented with an answering machine, so they can call me back when they're free so I can go about my own business. Score. Note that even then the call came back in less than 15 min.

This is free market competition, despite being a product of strict government regulation, and it makes our lives so much better.

Oh yeah, Bell's support sucks. Long wait times and they only operate during normal office hours. Wait, what about those of us that have JOBS? Do I need to take time off work just so I can sit in front of the phone for an hour while I wait for one of your incompetent techs?

I'm going to go ahead and assume that he's using Teksavvy, as he has perfectly described their service breakdown.

http://teksavvy.com/

Switch to Teksavvy like I did, it's dsl but even if you have to rent a phone line from them you still get truely unlimited service for cheaper than rogers' capped and throttled service. Hopefully you are in southern Ontario like I'm assuming.
http://www.teksavvy.com/

I've heard from a few people that 3web's support sucks. Myself, I've been considering a switch from Bell to TekSavvy.

Anyone in Canada looking to switch ISPs should check out http://www.canadianisp.com/. They have a list of ISPs in most major cities (82 for me in Toronto) complete with customer reviews.

See here. I bet there are a whole bunch of good, small ISPs where you are. I am with a small ISP and they are a refreshment after Rogers (local cable, 40% packet loss at peak times) and Bell. No phoney "unlimited" accounts, all ports open, servers allowed, static IPs available, no scripted $7/hr bots on the phones, SLAs available...